Parallel transactions in distributed DBs incur high overhead for concurrency control and aborts. We propose an alternative approach by pre-serializing possibly conflicting trans- actions, and parallelizing non-conflicting update transactions to different replicas. Our system provides strong transactional guarantees. In effect, Gargamel partitions the database dynamically according to the update workload. Each database replica runs sequentially, at full bandwidth; mutual synchronisation between replicas remains minimal. Our simulations show that Gargamel improves both response time and load by an order of magnitude when contention is high (highly loaded system with bounded resources), and that otherwise slow-down is negligible